Health & Medicine

Stroke in young adults and pregnant women is becoming more common: they are striking venous thrombosis of the cerebral sinuses.

In February 2011, the American Heart Association has released an official report, which is dedicated to the diagnosis and treatment of rare and often overlooked form of stroke.

This cerebral venous thrombosis, in which are involved in the pathological process is not an artery, which most often occurs in stroke and cerebral veins.It turns out that this form of stroke is not so rare.

this stroke affects mainly children, young people, pregnant women and new mothers who have just given birth.If we talk about the development of the mechanisms of cerebral venous thrombosis, when a blood clot that occurs in the venous sinuses of the dura mater - the veins that carry blood from the brain to the heart flows away.

Stroke in young: symptoms

The most common symptom of this condition - a headache, which gradually intensified over several days or even weeks.Also recorded seizures.Some

patients complain of double vision, weakness of the muscles of the extremities and other neurological manifestations.

diagnosis of cerebral thrombosis is based on clinical examination and imaging of cerebral vessels.Clinical studies show that magnetic resonance imaging is more sensitive to the detection of vascular changes in the brain than a CT scan.

risk group

Thrombosis venous sinuses of the brain disproportionately affects pregnant women and women in the postpartum period.In addition, the disease often occurs in women who have to protect against unwanted pregnancy taking hormonal contraceptives, and persons aged 45 years and younger.

In Western countries, the prevalence of this type of stroke in pregnant and had just given birth to women is 1 in 2500 births.And the greatest risk of thrombosis is celebrated during the third trimester of pregnancy and during the first four weeks after birth.

report authors advise physicians of suspected cerebral venous thrombosis conduct a comprehensive study of the blood parameters of their patients.It is necessary to identify congenital or acquired factors which predispose to the appearance of blood clots in the vessels.

addition, researchers recommend patients to carry out a survey to detect the conditions that allow the development of venous thrombosis, such as concomitant inflammatory and infectious diseases.

«In 2/3 patients with cerebral thrombosis identifies any conditions that predispose to the formation of blood clots," - says Gustavo Saposnik, one of the authors of the report, an associate professor of medicine at St. Michael's Hospital at the University of Toronto.For women, it may be pregnant, postpartum, or oral contraceptives;dehydration or infection in children.Some of these precipitating factors are transient and reversible.

Experts also argue that all patients with bleeding in the brain tissue of unknown nature necessarily requires a scan of brain veins and sinuses.

report by the American Heart Association, which describes the modern views on the diagnosis, detection and treatment of cerebral venous thrombosis, published in the international journal Stroke.